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Dmytri Kleiner writes: "What is Venture Communism?"
Dmytri Kleiner
Venture Communism is an investment model designed to be a form of revolutionary worker's struggle. The Venture Commune is a type of voluntary worker's association, designed to enclose the productivity of labour and enable the possibility of the collective accumulation of Land and Capital, which, in the endgame, will eventually allow the workers to buy the entire world from the Capitalists.
Louis Proyect writes: Charles Mann wrote an article in Atlantic Monthly in March 2002 that argued that indigenous people were healthier and happier in 1491 than they ever were afterwards. The article is a stunning refutation of social Darwinism or any Marxist "stagist" schemas. The article can be read here.
"The Founding Sachems"
Charles C. Mann, NY Times
Amherst, Mass. — Seeking to understand this nation's democratic spirit, Alexis de Tocqueville journeyed to the famous centers of American liberty (Boston, Philadelphia, Washington), stoically enduring their "infernal" accommodations, food and roads and chatting up almost everyone he saw.
He even marched in a Fourth of July parade in Albany just ahead of a big float that featured a flag-waving Goddess of Liberty, a bust of Benjamin Franklin, and a printing press that spewed out copies of the Declaration of Independence for the cheering crowd. But for all his wit and intellect, Tocqueville never realized that he came closest to his goal just three days after the parade, when he stopped at the "rather unhealthy but thickly peopled" area around Syracuse.
Event Horizon
The Free Association
June 2005
"And what is the phantom fuzz screaming from Chicago to Berlin, from Mexico City to Paris? 'We are REAL REAL REAL!!! as this NIGHTSTICK!' As they feel, in their dim animal way, that reality is slipping away from them." — William Burroughs, commenting on the police beating protesters at the Democratic convention, Chicago 1968.
1. DOCTOR WHO
We’re used to thinking of time as a straight line. When we look back at history it seems like all past events only existed to lead us to this point. And when we think about the future we can only imagine that line continuing. The future we imagine is really only the present stretched out ahead of us. Therein lies the truism that science fiction is really always about contemporary society.
But history isn’t a straight line. It moves in a series of uncontrolled breaks, jolts and ruptures. Every now and then we get events that seem to have popped out of an alternate dimension. Events that don’t seem to belong to the timeline we were just on. These events carry their own timelines. When they appear, history seems to shift to accommodate them. Funny how we couldn’t see it before, but now we come to look there’s a line of history that seems to have existed just to lead us up to this moment. Such events also seem to carry their own alternate future. Things that seemed impossible a day or two before seem irresistible now.
"Info-Labour and Precarisation"
Franco Berardi (Bifo), Generation online,
"We have no future because our present is too volatile. The only possibility that
remains is the management of risk. The spinning top of the scenarios of the present
moment." — W. Gibson: Pattern recognition, tr. It. L'accademia dei sogni
In February 2003 the American journalist Bob Herbert published in the New York
Times the results of a cognitive survey on a sample of hundreds of unemployed
youths in Chicago: none of their interviewees expected to find work the next few
years, none of them expected to be able to rebel, or to set off large scale
collective change. The general sense of the interviews was a sentiment of profound
impotence. The perception of decline did not seem focused on politics, but on a
deeper cause, the scenario of a social and psychical involution that seems to
cancel every possibility of building alternatives.
The fragmentation of the present time is reversed in the implosion of the future.
"America's Neo-Conservative World Supremacists Will Fail:
Current US Megalomania Is Rooted in the Puritan Colonists' Certainties"
Eric Hobsbawm, Guardian (UK)
Three continuities link the global US of the cold war era
with the attempt to assert world supremacy since 2001. The
first is its position of international domination, outside
the sphere of influence of communist regimes during the cold
war, globally since the collapse of the USSR. This hegemony
no longer rests on the sheer size of the US economy. Large
though this is, it has declined since 1945 and its relative
decline continues. It is no longer the giant of global
manufacturing. The centre of the industrialised world is
rapidly shifting to the eastern half of Asia. Unlike older
imperialist countries, and unlike most other developed
industrial countries, the US has ceased to be a net exporter
of capital, or indeed the largest player in the international
game of buying up or establishing firms in other countries,
and the financial strength of the state rests on the
continued willingness of others, mostly Asians, to maintain
an otherwise intolerable fiscal deficit. The influence of the
American economy today rests largely on the heritage of the
cold war: the role of the US dollar as the world currency,
the international linkages of US firms established during
that era (notably in defence-related industries), the
restructuring of international economic transactions and
business practices along American lines, often under the
auspices of American firms. These are powerful assets, likely
to diminish only slowly. On the other hand, as the Iraq war
showed, the enormous political influence of the US abroad,
based as it was on a genuine "coalition of the willing"
against the USSR, has no similar foundation since the fall of
the Berlin wall. Only the enormous military-technological
power of the US is well beyond challenge. It makes the US
today the only power capable of effective military
intervention at short notice in any part on the world, and it
has twice demonstrated its capacity to win small wars with
great rapidity. And yet, as the Iraq war shows, even this
unparalleled capacity to destroy is not enough to impose
effective control on a resistant country, and even less on
the globe. Nevertheless, US dominance is real and the
disintegration of the USSR has made it global.
"Communique From the SI Concerning Vaneigem"
Guy Debord
Part 2 [Continued from here]
This permanent refusal to envision a real historical development, which was the product of his awareness and his acceptance of a relative personal incapacity (which thus increased), was accompanied — as was normal with Vaniegem — by an enthusiastic insistence on a caricature of the totality, in the revolution as in the SI, on the magic fusion, one day, of a spontaneity finally liberated (for the masses and for Vaneigem personally) with coherence: in such a wedding of identifications, the vulgar problems of real society and real revolution would be instantaneously abolished even before one had the displeasure of considering them, which is obviously an amiable perspective for the philosophy of history at the end of a banquet.
Vaneigem handled the concept of the qualitative by the ton, but resolutely forget what Hegel, in The Science of Logic, called "the most profound and most essential quality," which is contradiction. "In relating to it, actually, identity is only the determination of what is simple and immediate, of what is dead, insofar as contradiction is the source of all movement, of all life. This is only to the extent that a thing includes within itself a contradiction that shows itself to be active and alive."
Vaneigem, except at the beginning, didn't love the life of the SI, but loved its dead image, which was a glorious alibi for his mediocre life and a totally abstract hope for the future. Seeing that Vaneigem was quite comfortably accomodated to such a phantom, one understands how he could totally disperse it with a single breath, exactly on 14 November 1970, when it became necessary for him to begin to express his dissatisfaction, because taking the side of satisfied silence was no longer sustainable.
NOT BORED! writes: Guy Debord on Raoul Vaneigem, [Part One]
Not Bored!
Originally written 35 years ago, Guy Debord's "Communique of the SI concerning Vaneigem" was originally published in The Real Split in the International: Public Circular of the Situationist International (Chronos, 1974, 1985, 1990). A rather rough read, this translation has never been available on-line. What follows is a brand-new translation, which is interesting because 1) it is very well-written, and in Vaneigem's flowing style, not in Debord's aphoristic manner; 2) it is full of both stinging criticism and compassionate appreciation; and 3) it is very relevant to today's "practioneers" of "situationism."
Anonymous Comrade writes
Drowning in Filth
John Chuckman
"We are all drowning in filth…I feel that intellectual honesty and balanced judgement have simply disappeared from the face of the earth." — George Orwell (diary entry for 27 April, 1942)
I've given the date of Orwell's words lest someone think they were written by a contemporary bearing the writer's name. Recent events surely qualify the United States to claim some sort of title from the Guinness Book of Records such as the world's largest moral and intellectual open sewer.
A man by the name of Ed Klein has written a vile book called The Truth about Hillary. Perceptive readers may require no more information about this book than the fact that Klein is a former editor for The New York Times. The Times reputation as a newspaper upholding genuine liberal values exists only in the minds of those who regard rolling on the floor and babbling in tongues as divine inspiration. For decades, the Times has demonstrated enough dissembling, unwarranted personal attacks, subtle omissions, and tweaking of words to qualify many times over for a J. Edgar Hoover Official G-Man Helper Award. So what would you expect from a former editor?
America's Neo-Conservative World Supremacists Will Fail
Eric Hobsbawm, The Guardian
Three continuities link the global US of the cold war era with the attempt to assert world supremacy since 2001. The first is its position of international domination, outside the sphere of influence of communist regimes during the cold war, globally since the collapse of the USSR. This hegemony no longer rests on the sheer size of the US economy. Large though this is, it has declined since 1945 and its relative decline continues. It is no longer the giant of global manufacturing. The centre of the industrialised world is rapidly shifting to the eastern half of Asia. Unlike older imperialist countries, and unlike most other developed industrial countries, the US has ceased to be a net exporter of capital, or indeed the largest player in the international game of buying up or establishing firms in other countries, and the financial strength of the state rests on the continued willingness of others, mostly Asians, to maintain an otherwise intolerable fiscal deficit.
"Bards of the Powerful"
George Monbiot, London Guardian
Far from challenging the G8's role in Africa's poverty,
Geldof and Bono are legitimising its power.
"Hackers bombard financial networks", the Financial Times reported on Thursday. Government departments and businesses "have been bombarded with a sophisticated electronic attack for several months". It is being organised by an Asian criminal network, and is "aimed at stealing commercially and economically sensitive information". By Thursday afternoon, the story had mutated. "G8 hackers target banks and ministries", said the headline in the Evening Standard. Their purpose was "to cripple the systems as a protest before the G8 summit". The Standard advanced no evidence to justify this metamorphosis.
This is just one instance of the reams of twaddle about the dark designs of the G8 protesters codded up by the corporate press. That the same stories have been told about almost every impending public protest planned in the past thirty years and that they have invariably fallen apart under examination appears to present no impediment to their repetition. The real danger at the G8 summit is not that the protests will turn violent — the appetite for that pretty well disappeared in September 2001 — but that they will be far too polite.
Let me be more precise. The danger is that we will follow the agenda set by Bono and Bob Geldof.
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